War inside and out

Combat Strength(CS)

Combat Strength, or CS, is a numerical representation of the strength of your unit. The five direct factors that effect it are:

Training % (how experienced your men are)
Weapons/Armour % (how high quality your weapons and armour are)
Equipment damage
Morale (how happy your men are)
Cohesion (how well your men know each other)

If you have high weapons/armour values, high training, high morale, high cohesion and low damage, your unit is at optimum fighting strength. All of these values affect your 'Combat Strength'.

Training

Training is good, clearly, so you want that to be as high as possible. It will increase with training and battle.

Weapons/Armour quality

Weapons/Armour quality depends on what your men were when you recruited. You can't increase or decrease this unless you add better/worse men (adding better men increasing, and worse men decreasing).

Damage

Equipment damage occurs every turn, except when you are in a city. Travel, training, battle, even simply being 'dug in' a region can cause equipment damage. Equipment damage reduces your CS, so you want this as low as possible. If your damage gets too high it can start injuring or even killing your men as they use badly damaged equipment or fight each other for the best equipment. Also, having your men fight over equipment will reduce cohesion. You can repair equipment in most cities and strongholds and some townsland regions. However, strongholds and townsland regions have only limited blacksmiths, and they will not be able to fully repair your equipment.

Morale

Morale varies both up and down. Typically, entertainment will have it rise, as will normal turn change. Being far from your realm will see it fall, and training will see it fall. Battle can either see it rise or fall, depending on what your unit is like. From there, it depends on the unit. Paying your men will only ever have it rise (if there is any effect at all). Clearly, more content men fight better than annoyed men, so keep it high. In order to keep your morale high when you are far away from your own realm, switch your men to mercenaries. They will cost 50% more in terms of wages, but their morale will not drop nearly as much as other units.

Cohesion

Cohesion is increased with training, battle and sometimes entertainment (if you find what kind of entertainment your men really like, but you can only use entertainment when morale is less than 100%), and at the turn change. It is decreased by adding new men, since these new men won't know the men in your unit very well, and your men fighting over equipment when it is highly damaged.

Typical values

Some standard and good CS/man values are as follows: Infantry/Archers/MI: Average/standard: 10, Good: 20 Cavalry/SF: Average/standard: 15-20, Good: 20-25

Effect in battle

Now, having a huge CS does not mean you have won the battle. You can have a unit of 1000 CS Infantry, but that infantry might be 200 men, with 20% cohesion. They are very weak individually and the unit will break and flee the battlefield very easily. Compare a unit of 50 men with 95% cohesion, these men trust each other more and will fight better alongside men they know and have trained with, so will fight better and be much harder to make flee from the battlefield. Not only that, they are individually a match for at least 4 men from the other unit.

Just use some common sense. If your enemy have units that reach 60 men or more but only have a CS of 500, they aren't that good or have some serious issues (low morale, high equipment damage, low experience, etc). If your enemy have 40-man units that are 800 CS, you better watch out, those are some very well prepared and coherent forces that will be hard to break. Those judgements have to be made yourself.

Tactical Maneuvers

Tactical moves can be many things. Good, Bad, Suicidal, Intelligent and Bold are the ones covered below.

Good tactical maneuvers would consist of the ones the enemy does not correctly predict, like when there are two regions they think you are going to attack one so they are heading there but send a small force to the other just in case and you attack the other destroying a small force of the enemy. That would be a good maneuver for these reasons:

1) You now control the field

2) You destroyed a small force of enemy soldiers.

3) Their army must now turn towards your army to get you off their land and without having as many soldiers as they could have.

Bad maneuvers would be those that you attack even though you should defend or avoid the battle. Like moving out from your walls and attacking there palisade with close to even forces.

Suicidal maneuvers are close to that of bad but the difference is the enemy know sits coming(predicts it) and has more men, better men, walls, and pretty much everything else in their advantage. There is next to no chance of victory for you and yet you attack or still try to defend when they outnumber you massively instead of retreating and waiting for reinforcements for a counter attack.

Intelligent maneuvers would be attack where the enemy does not expect it, attacking in a place where there army is far away from. Another intelligent maneuver would be getting 5k cs in open field out of the way for a 20k cs enemy attacking, other words retreating since you know that you will just lose your 5k cs only kill 2k cs.

Bold maneuvers are those of even battles maybe less or more than the enemy by a little bit. You attack with 20k cs against a 21k cs in open field while the enemy does not think the attack is going to happen or you could be even more less than them and do that. It all matters as bold maneuvers can be considered many things.

All in all you should avoid bad and suicidal maneuvers and mix up bold and intelligent maneuvers and you can destroy the enemy or at least put up one heck of a fight.

Infiltration

~~Infiltrators can be a deciding factor in war, if used right infiltrators are a great weapon,but, if used wrong they can hurt.

~~To use infiltrators correctly you should hit people that the infiltrator can handle a region or two before the region where the battle will be taken place doing this enough can cause a battle to go in your favor. You should also use them to delay movement by mixing signs and so forth in a region where the enemy is attacking from, doing so can cause some troops staying back and can cause a mismatch in the battle. Using them as scribes to scout regions with some scouts without being detected, doing so can get you information from there regions from which the enemy does not think you have information to. You should also have your infiltrators to hit there economy by burning there food to cause them to have to send more food there. Stealing taxes is also another good way to use them if they have low taxes and so do you it will be very good as you will have more tax gold then them. Using infiltrators to kill off the fortifications after a battle which nearly destroyed them but didn't. Infiltrators can do a lot in a war for you, its nice to have some on your side.

~~Using them incorrectly would be to just attacking random targets which they can not handle, they will just get caught then exacuted and everone in the realm will want to advenge the death and it causes anger and anger is not a good thing, anger is something that kills some realms.

General Traits

~~General traits can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Bad

Foolish or ignorance:

Attacking regions with no gain or making suicidal maneuvers.

Anger: Anger will cause nothing but trouble for the realm, making the commands be to aggressive.
Greed: Greed will cause you to also be overly aggressive and it will make you do certain maneuvers that are not positive moves.
Negitive: Thinking you will lose the war and anything negitive will cause those around you to think the same. You will have no hope to the point were you do not even really try to come out victorious. There are wars of wich are lost because of this trait.

Good

Positively: Keeps moral up and makes you believe you can win it is a big deciding factor and it has the opposite affects of the Negative trait.
Cleverness: Cleverness will help you make unpredictable moves which will lead to a victory.
Self-discipline: Self-discipline will keep you from getting angered and making ignorant moves.
Communication: A General must be able Communicate constantly to TLs.

Morale of TroopLeaders(TLs)

Morale of your troopleaders means more then most would think. If the morale of your TLs are low then they may not move when ordered, they may not bring up ideas to the council, they may not even recruit units that they could maintain, it would be common to see TLs running away or leaving your realm due to this, there is also the chance of them becoming an enemy spy revealing your plans to the enemy which is something we want to avoid, and they might ignore misdirection orders which can hurt.

Scenarios

~~I am going to create Scenarios and use the information from this article to conclude certain moves and so forth. Feel free to make comments in the discussion page for the scenarios that I create I will be using maps from the islands. I'll include a link to the map so you can look at it yourself.

Note: This has not been added yet as you can see, if you want to create one you are more then welcome to do so as long as they fit the information above, once I create one you will understand what I am talking about.

Other pages

Unit Settings - If you want unit settings and some other information go there, had information about unit settings on here but due to people not wanting doubles I took it off.

Battle - another page with some information

Unit Orders - same as above

Maps - For once we get into Scenarios or when ever you want to look at a map of an island.